Meddling With a Myth : GARBO: HER STORY<i> by Antoni Gronowicz afterword by Richard Schickel (Simon & Schuster: $24.95; 476 pp., illustrated; 0-621-22523-5) </i>

“Garbo talks,” the ad slogan for the film “Anna Christie,” will also serve--with at least one question mark added--for this book, which is described in the jacket note as “based on a long and intimate friendship,” and by the author as “the story of (Garbo’s) life, as she told it to me, in that voice I will never forget.”

Completed in 1976 but turned down by the publisher Dodd, Mead because it contained too much “unverifiable” material, the book was acquired by Simon & Schuster but could not be published while the actress was alive. When she heard of its existence in 1978, Garbo issued two sworn affidavits through her lawyer, denying “any type of human relationship” with author Antoni Gronowicz.

In the meantime, Gronowicz published another book, supposedly based on long and intimate conversations with Pope John Paul II. When a statement from the Vatican denied that the Pontiff had ever met the author, the work was repudiated and shredded by its publishers.

Very shortly after Garbo’s death in April, 1990, however, “Garbo: Her Story” appeared in the bookstores. Evidently a movie star is less infallible than the Pope, for Simon & Schuster claimed that the company had conducted an investigation into Garbo’s denial and (without offering any evidence) found it “simply not creditable.”

In a prologue, Gronowicz writes that he first met Garbo “in the summer of 1938, in Riond-Boisson, Switzerland. She was a house guest of the famous pianist and politician, Paderewski, who had also invited Gronowicz there to arrange his papers.” Garbo tells Gronowicz: “Mr. Paderewski is trying to convince me that you should write a book about me.” They take a walk together, hand in hand, and when they return to Garbo’s chalet, she promptly pulls the author into bed. After some feverish lovemaking, she performs “forceful dance exercises while singing a Swedish peasant song.”

In my own investigation of Garbo’s movements during 1938, I found that (forceful exercises apart) they were fully documented. She spent much of the year with Leopold Stokowski, and the press followed them everywhere. They never visited Switzerland but were in Italy during April and May, then drove to Paris. After a brief stay there, they continued to Sweden and spent three months on Garbo’s estate outside Stockholm. At the end of August, Stokowski returned to New York, and after remaining in Sweden for another month, Garbo returned to Los Angeles. Additionally, there is no record in the press, or in any biography of Garbo, that she ever met Paderewski and no mention of Gronowicz in any biography of Paderewski himself.

Of the many other statements by Gronowicz, in his own voice or Garbo’s, that are “simply not creditable,” space permits me to suggest only the tip of the iceberg.

According to Gronowicz, the actress claimed that when she first arrived in New York, an MGM executive was very skeptical of her future: “How can Miss Garbo play in our films if she can’t even read English?” But any movie executive would have known, in 1925, that most foreign stars of the silent era--Pola Negri, Vilma Banky, Renee Adoree--read and spoke minimal English on arrival in America, and it proved no obstacle.

Garbo also tells Gronowicz that although Robert Montgomery, her partner in “Inspiration,” had “more enthusiasm than talent,” she felt so sorry about the bad notices he received when the picture came out, that “I helped him get a role in ‘Strangers May Kiss,’ in which the leading lady was Norma Shearer.” In fact, Montgomery was a major MGM contract star at the time, had already made two films with Shearer, and finished shooting “Strangers May Kiss” before “Inspiration” was released.

Although Garbo freely acknowledged to many people the importance of her friendship with screenwriter Salka Viertel, and credited her with suggesting “Queen Christina” as a vehicle, to Gronowicz she makes only the barest, most distant mention of Viertel and attributes the idea of “Queen Christina” to Marie Dressler. (“I will never forget her warm body,” she adds, confiding that Dressler was her first lesbian lover.)

And her account of the making of “Queen Christina” is equally at odds with established fact. “Not at all satisfied with the script” by Viertel, she says in this book that she complained to the director, Rouben Mamoulian, who arranged for S. N. Behrman to polish it. But Garbo was on a long vacation in Europe during the entire scripting stage, and returned only after Behrman had completed his assignment. It was not Mamoulian but the producer, Walter Wanger, who engaged him; and far from objecting, as Garbo says here, Viertel collaborated very happily with Behrman and they became good friends.

Apart from the Dressler affair, Garbo makes a few other scandal-sheet “revelations” to Gronowicz, notably that she found “masturbation is more rewarding than sexual intercourse between male and female.” In spite of this, Gronowicz reports that she was overwhelmed by her one-night stand with a steward on board a transatlantic freighter: “His body was muscular and brown. The statues of Apollo and Minerva flashed through my mind.” Only exclamation points are called for here, but we are back with question marks when she states that after the failure of “Two-Faced Woman” in 1942, she decided to make retirement the most attention-catching role of her life.

“Planning action on a world scale,” Garbo claims, she abandoned the Hollywood scene to become “part of a different circle of people,” mainly aristocrats, politicians and intellectuals, calculating that such a move would not only keep her legend alive but cause it to “gain in value.” And as a first step, she moved to the Hampshire House in New York, an appropriate setting for “my new character.”

In fact, she moved to the Ritz Towers but kept her house in Beverly Hills and continued to see old friends: Viertel, George Cukor, the playwright Molnar, Constance Collier. For several years, she hoped to return to movies, but the only three projects she was enthusiastic about could not be financed--Cocteau’s “The Eagle With Two Heads” for Korda, a film about Georges Sand to be directed by Cukor from a script by Viertel, and a version of Balzac’s “La Duchesse de Langeais.” After the third disappointment, in 1948, as she told many people later, she lost confidence and finally gave up her career.

At the same time, she met George Schlee, the New York lawyer who became her lover, and in his company, began to mingle occasionally with the titled rich. She made only one close friend among them, the Baroness Cecile de Rothschild. In an afterword to this book, which he apparently takes at face value, Time’s film critic Richard Schickel goes off on an ugly homophobic tangent when he calls Garbo’s plan to cultivate “the best minds and spirits of her time” a failure. “The only artists she saw,” he writes, were homosexuals who confined her to a “narrow cut of life.” But apart from Noel Coward and Cecil Beaton, the later friends she made among writers and artists were straight: Remarque, Irwin Shaw, John Gunther, Salka’s son Peter Viertel.

It seems that almost every celebrity has to die twice: after the private death, the public autopsies and cutting down to size. Gronowicz’s Garbo, endorsed by Schickel, annihilates the person described during her lifetime by her known friends. From beyond the grave, she emerges as grim, calculating, humorless and greedy, insisting that she was driven only by “ambition and egoism” and the desire for “fame and money”; convinced from the start “that with my talent and capacity for work, I could play any role better than anyone else.”

Yet Cukor, Viertel, Beaton and Behrman all agreed that she was a creature of instinct, often insecure, refusing to see her rushes because she was afraid of disappointing herself. Director Jacques Feyder recalled in his memoirs that when they saw “Anna Christie” together, Garbo kept whispering, “Isn’t it terrible?” and left before the end. Gronowicz’s Garbo considers it her best performance, and is so self-glorifying that she reels off her good notices verbatim and dismisses the work of most of her colleagues. Stroheim was “mediocre” in “As You Desire Me,” Gable “most undistinguished” in “Susan Lenox.” As for directors: “If an actress in films has great talent, she doesn’t need a director.”

During the late ‘60s, I met and talked with Garbo a few times. We were both visiting Salka Viertel, by then living in Switzerland. There were days when she withdrew into a melancholy Baltic twilight, but she was usually animated, restless, with a quirky sense of humor about her “legend,” and very open about her mistakes.

“I’ve smoked since I was a small boy,” she remarked as she lit a cigarette, a joke Viertel told me that she often made, alluding to the gender confusion she created and the rumors of her bisexuality. She said that she hadn’t enjoyed making “Ninotchka,” had little rapport with Lubitsch, and was so fearful of disliking the picture that she put off seeing it for three years. Then she realized how wrong she had been. Salka nodded, reminding Garbo that she found Lubitsch “vulgar.” (Gronowicz reports that she “felt good” about working with Lubitsch, certain she was beginning a “new career as a comedy actress.”) I asked what she thought about when she took one of her long walks alone, and she answered at once, “The past.” Then, with a laugh: “And how foolish I was!”

When I asked her to elaborate, she became evasive. “Maybe, when I know you better, I tell. . . .” And when she asked what parts I thought she could still play, I knew she had no intention of acting again and it was a game to test my image of her. Flirtatious as well as evasive, she gave the impression of someone as mysterious to herself as she had appeared on the screen.

“If I’m such a legend, why am I so lonely?” Judy Garland once asked, and although Garbo tried to put down her legend, she never could replace it with an identity that measured up. There was no “new character,” only the same one searching for new distractions. After Schlee died, and she outlived most of her friends, she drifted like her screen persona toward a terminal loneliness.

The mystery of Antoni Gronowicz also remains. He died in 1985, and although a jacket note describes him as “the late, acclaimed poet and novelist,” an extensive two-volume encyclopedia of Polish literature published a few years ago makes no mention of him.

Of his other works, I have been able to trace only a biography of Rachmaninoff, published here in translation in 1945. It contains some long, dramatized dialogues between Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky, with no sources acknowledged, and a deathbed scene in which Gronowicz assures us: “All passed before him. Everywhere he saw smiling faces, happy faces. . . .”

This no more suggests a distinguished writer than the attempt to reproduce Garbo’s voice, which comes out turgid instead of mercurial, monotone instead of constantly changing. But it does suggest an incurable fantasist, and in the case of “Garbo: Her Story,” something more.

Did he create such a coldly unpleasant character as an act of revenge--for not having met her, for not having felt her start “to tremble as if an electric current were coursing through her” when he took her in his arms?